Shock Forest Group

Sheryn Akiki, Axel Coumans, Susanna Gonzo,
Nicolas Jaar, Daria Kiseleva, Jelger Kroese, Masa Nazzal

Shock Forest Group (SFG) convened for a residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios during our Spring Session 2025, in partnership with Fuori Festival and Viaindustriae, and supported by Culture Moves Europe. SFG is a decentralised collective consisting of artists, activists, ecologists, musicians and researchers who, through a process of ‘collaborative listening’, explore relationships between technology, violence and ecology. Their work creates opportunities for community engagement, public performance, collective improvisation, and other experiments in radical presence. 

SFG consists of seven active members: Sheryn Akiki, Axel Coumans, Susanna Gonzo, Nicolas Jaar, Daria Kiseleva, Jelger Kroese and Masa Nazzal.

The collective was originally convened in 2019 by Nicolas Jaar for a project with Het HEM, a Dutch cultural institution occupying a former munitions factory. SFG took their name from the ‘shokbos’ (shock forest) planted next to the factory which served as a testing ground for explosives and an acoustic barrier silencing the military work from the nearby town. The site, which surprisingly hosted Europe’s largest heron population, illustrated many of the concerns which helped to define the collective’s ensuing investigations. 

In Umbria, ‘the green heart of Italy’, SFG began their research by responding to a much older forest: at the summit of Monteluco, reachable from the old town of Spoleto by a medieval viaduct, is a forest which, according to the ‘Lex Spoletina’ (written on stones dating to the 3rd century BC), was scared to the Roman god Jupiter. The law imposes conservation rules – to do with forestation and upkeep – and is considered to be one of the earliest known environmental laws. Next to the forest, St Francis, patron saint of the environment, founded a monastery, while in the 1930s Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo, a celebrated environmentalist, had a monument erected in his memory.  

SFG’s project is developed in two phases: after the Spring 2025 research residency, the collective will reconvene for a second session when they will form a ‘New Temporary Shock Forest Group’: open to all applicants, SFG will invite participants to join a collective learning environment and an open-research process, reflecting on questions arising from their work in Spoleto.

At an Open Studios event at the close of their research residency, SFG shared an improvised performance titled ‘Café Rumour’, drawing together the different strands of their research in Spoleto. The following text accompanied the event: 

Café Rumour 

Shock Forest Group has worked in and around forests since 2019. From a forest in Zaandam (NL) used as a sonic border to camouflage military tests, to the forests in Bosnia and Croatia which are used as border zones covering the EUs illegal push-back practices. The group has been in Spoleto hosted by Mahler & LeWitt Studios for the past three weeks, spending time in the Monteluco forest and its surroundings. Monteluco meaning “Mountain of the Sacred Forest”, a small, bordered forest defined as sacred since pre- Roman times. 

What defines that which is sacred? 

In the heart of the Monteluco forest, past the stone walls which enclose it and divide sacred trees from profane, there lies a monument. It states: ‘Consacrata a la memoria di’, then an erased name, chiseled from the stone. Below, it continues: ‘tenace difensore de la ricchezza boschiva d’Italia.’ Dedicated to the memory of […] a tenacious defender of Italy’s forest wealth. This monument was placed in the forest in 1937 as a dedication to Arnaldo Mussolini – Benito’s brother and the head of the national forestry committee – six years after his death. 

State control and national identity are always enmeshed with the very act of bordering itself. In the context of our present moment, where far right governments are proliferating around the world, we see how their focus often tends to centre around immigration. The inner sanctity of the state is dependent on defining itself against another, national identity is protected like a sacred forest. 

Where do we find the openings in a world that is bordered? How to resist a system of violent physical and mental enclosures without using the same tools as those of a bordered world? What does a political program based on collective joy look like? 

What does it sound like? What will it sound like? Where can we find its echoes? 

Café Rumour is the place we want to invite you in, at this point in our research. A moment for whispers, listenings and conversations among us all. 

Gossip and rumours reside on the margins. Left uncared for, they can be weaponised and quickly turn into disinformation, but they also have the potential to make way for new sounds. As an interim form of knowledge, they can blow open the cracks in narratives, intermingling fact and fiction, history and memory. Can rumours be a rebellion against the constraints and rigidity of state-sanctioned sacred narratives? 

The collective’s research is facilitated by a number of partners and advisors including: FuoriFestival – a Spoleto-based events producer with a focus on music and collaborative interdisciplinary practices. Viaindustriae – a publisher and research organisiation in Foligno with a collection of artists’ books, related ephemera and art, dating from Futurism to the present. Saverio Verini – Director of the Musei Civici di Spoleto. The Mahler & LeWitt Studios hosts residencies and projects, for all the arts, using the former studios of stone sculptor Anna Mahler and conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, as well as the Torre Bonomo.

Shock Forest Group

SFG have developed chapters of activity with the SRTP Festival and Van Abbemuseum, both in Eindhoven (2023). The latter, titled the Cosmic Radio project, introduced the New Temporary Shock Forest Group: a group of participants who are invited by the Shock Forest Group to join them in their research, to collectively create and dialogue. Across these projects, SFG have curated exhibitions, designed installations, staged performances and aired radio programs, as a collective and with community participants. They have developed soundscapes and scores, using handmade instruments, and hosted listening groups. Listening sessions, talks and public meals have provided important opportunities for meeting and dialogue. SFG also record their work in writings and essays. For a survey of their work to date visit: www.shockforest.group.

… A lot of conflicts in the world we’re living in are due to a lack of listening and empathy, to an inability
to inhabit collective spaces and hear each other with respect, to resolve complex challenges and let tension exist.

… Shock Forest Group is an experiment in open research, where the research categories surface as the research develops. It is also an experiment in alternative education, a classroom without a teacher, where the learning emerges as the product of polyphony.

… Listening and opening up our attention to notice violent histories is an important element of healing, of re-sensitising ourselves to be able to receive them instead of blocking them out.

— Shock Forest Group

Active Members

Sheryn Akiki (b.1993, LB) is an artist and designer. She explores the impacts of socio-political landscapes, the post-colonial body as heritage made flesh, and the psycho- militarised.

Axel Coumans (b.1993, NL) is a designer involved in social projects as a community organiser, a concept developer and as a gardener, investigating how cultural practice can connect to agroecology and silviculture.

Susanna Gonzo (b.1990, IT) is an artist, linguist and researcher experimenting with drawing, sound, moving image and performance. She facilitates spaces of learning through listening and creative exercises.

Nicolás Jaar (b.1990, US) In recent years artist Nicolás Jaar has mainly focused on education, teaching sound-editing and listening workshops to emerging musicians and non- musicians alike.

Daria Kiseleva (b.1989, RU) is an artist researching the aesthetics of representation and knowledge production, perceptual frameworks, and socio-political imaginaries, as manifested in cultural narratives and media technologies.

Jelger Kroese (b.1989, NL) is a designer, facilitator and applied researcher helping communities grow environments and cultures of inquiry and care around social and ecological issues.

Masa Nazzal (b. 2000, US) is an organizer and researcher who focuses on community education and border abolition. She uses sound, embroidery and writings to imagine borderless futures.